Read Online Lethal Circuit by Lars Guignard - Free Book Online

“Helmuth Heimler.” She tossed the final passport to Michael without opening it.
    “You want to play?”
    Michael stared down at the passports he now held in hand. There was no denying that the documents were disconcerting, but he wasn’t going to let Kate have the upper hand. Not if he could help it.
    “Your father wasn’t the man you thought he was, Michael.”
    “There are explanations for this.”
    “Name one.”
    “He traveled.”
    “With a gun?”
    “Why not?”
    “Unlikely your average foreign shoe salesman would risk bringing a firearm to China.”
    “So he picked it up here. For self-defense.”
    “This isn’t Texas.”
    “No shit.”
    Kate shook her head. “Let me guess. He needed a few fake passports too, right? For self-defense.” Kate turned her glance down to the hard packed floor. “Remember your kidnapping back in Peru? Remember the men who did it?”
    Michael stiffened. “How do you know about that?”
    “Didn’t you find it strange that you were a target?”
    “It was opportunistic. They followed us there. For money.”
    “You don’t think it had anything to do with who he was?”
    Michael felt his blood run cold. “What do you want, lady? Answers? What about you? Who are you? Why do you care about my father?”
    Kate lowered her gun, tucking the weapon behind her back. “Your father worked for the CIA. He was an intelligence operative. A spy.”
    Michael just laughed. “And how would you know that?”
    “Because I was his partner,” she said.

10

    PASADENA, CA

    M OBI S TEARN LOVED chicken. He loved fried chicken, he loved teriyaki chicken, he loved chicken kabob, but most of all he loved Zankou chicken. Zankou was the name of a river in Lebanon, somebody’s dog, and most importantly, six or seven fast food restaurants dishing out the tastiest, tangiest Lebanese style rotisserie chicken in all of Los Angeles County. The chicken was served with Lebanese pickles, tomatoes, hummus, and a tasty garlic paste, all of which Mobi was trying his best to wrap inside an undersized pita when the call came in.
    Mobi dropped his whole pita upon the shrill chirp of the phone in fear that one of his supervisors had caught him violating the “no lunch in the lab” policy again. Mobi was a communications engineer in Pasadena, California, a mid-sized city about fifteen miles northeast of Los Angeles. And though Pasadena was best known for the Rose Bowl, the Rose Parade, and associated Rose events, it was also home to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the world leader in the robotic exploration of space.
    Operated as a civilian space research facility in conjunction with the California Institute of Technology, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL as it was known, was both a cutting edge research facility and Mobi Stearn’s nine to five. Mobi enjoyed the fact that referring to his work as a nine to five was an entirely accurate description providing one heeded the caveat that he actually worked the graveyard shift between the hours of nine p.m. and five a.m. Mobi’s title was Deputy to the Deputy Director of Operations. He had ground his way through the grueling PhD program at Caltech to win the job, but the reality was that most of his duties were deathly dull. His work on the current mission, as all of JPL’s space flights were labeled, was to monitor unmanned spacecraft Polo’s orbit of Jupiter’s moon Io. At a distance of three hundred seventy-two million miles, radio communications from Polo took about fifty-two minutes to reach Earth, so Mobi was fairly certain that another half second spent wiping the grease from his hands wouldn’t add up to any major damage before he answered the phone.
    “Stearn,” Mobi said through a mostly empty mouth.
    “Mobi? I need you up here right away.”
    Mobi immediately recognized the voice on the other end of the line as belonging to his boss, Deputy Director Allison Alvarez. “Is this about the chicken? Because if it’s about the chicken